How to follow up after a networking event

Why follow-up fails

It is almost never laziness. It is three specific failures that compound:

• The details evaporate. You remember a great conversation about supply chains with someone whose name and company are gone by Tuesday. Without the specifics, any message you write is generic — and generic messages feel bad to send, so you don't send them.
• The list is undifferentiated. Forty contacts with no priority attached is forty equally daunting tasks. The mind treats it as one enormous job and defers it.
• There is no state. Three days in, you cannot remember who you have already emailed, so you risk either double-messaging or messaging nobody. Ambiguity is a reliable way to stop.

Each failure has a cheap fix, and all three fixes happen before you write a single message.

At the event: capture, don't remember

Everything downstream depends on what you capture in the sixty seconds after a conversation ends. Three fields is enough:

1. Who they are — captured mechanically, not typed. Scanning a QR code takes about two seconds and is the only method with a completion rate near 100%. Typing a name into your phone while someone watches does not survive contact with a busy room.
2. One line about the conversation— the thing you would need in order to write a message that couldn't have been sent to anybody else. “Rebuilding their onboarding in Q4, frustrated with their current vendor” is worth more than any amount of contact metadata.
3. Which event it was — ideally attached automatically. This is the field people skip and regret. Six months from now you will remember where you met someone long after you have lost their name, and event tags turn that memory into a working search.

The Linkava iOS app is built around exactly this loop: scan a Linkava or LinkedIn QR code, the contact saves instantly with the event already attached, and you type one line of note while it is still true.

The morning after: triage in tiers

Do this once, over coffee, the day after the event. Twenty minutes. Sort every contact into three tiers:

Tier three is the point of the exercise. Giving yourself explicit permission not to message thirty people is what makes messaging the eight who matter feel achievable.

Writing a message people reply to

A follow-up needs three components. Anything else is padding that lowers your reply rate.

1. Where you met, in the first line. They met dozens of people too. Do not make them work out who you are.
2. One specific detail from the conversation. This is the entire message, really — it is the proof that a human wrote it and that you were listening.
3. One small, clear next step. A specific, low-commitment ask beats “let me know if you'd ever like to chat”, which asks the recipient to do the work of inventing the next step.

Keep it under about 120 words. Do not attach a deck. Do not open with “I hope this email finds you well”. Send it from a phone if that is what gets it sent.

Three templates

Tier 1 — there is a real opportunity

Hi Sam — we talked by the coffee stand at SaaStr about your onboarding rebuild in Q4. You mentioned the handoff between sales and CS was where things break down. I've seen two teams solve that in different ways and could walk you through both — worth 20 minutes next week? Happy to send a summary by email instead if that's easier.

Tier 1 — you promised something

Hi Priya — great to meet you at the Berlin meetup last night. I said I'd send you the write-up on migrating off a monolith without a freeze — here it is. The part relevant to your situation starts at “strangler routing”. Let me know how the December cutover goes.

Tier 2 — warm, no agenda

Hi Tom — we met at the fintech roundtable on Thursday, you were the one arguing that KYC vendors have got worse, not better. Enjoyed that. Connecting here so we stay in touch.

Track state, not intentions

The final failure mode is losing track of who you have already reached. You do not need a sales CRM for this — seven pipeline stages is a system nobody maintains past week two. You need three states:

• New — captured, not yet contacted.
• Contacted — you have reached out; the ball is in their court.
• Done — the thread has run its course, either into something real or into nothing.

That is exactly the pipeline Linkava ships with, for the same reason: the only question a personal networking system has to answer is which people are still sitting in “new”.

The long tail, months later

The tier-three contacts you deliberately ignored are where the compounding value sits. When you need an introduction to a company, or a specialist in a niche, or someone who has done the thing you are about to attempt, the person is often already in your contacts from an event eighteen months ago. That only works if two things are true: you captured them at all, and you can find them.

Search by event, skim the notes, and reach out with “we met at X, you mentioned Y”. It lands very differently from a cold message — and it costs nothing, because the work was done in the sixty seconds after the original handshake.

The checklist

• Before the event: your QR code on your phone's lock screen.
• During: scan every contact within a minute of the conversation ending.
• During: one line of note per person, immediately.
• Day after, 20 minutes: sort into tiers 1, 2 and 3.
• Day after: send every tier-1 message.
• Within a week: send tier-2 connection requests.
• Day 10: one gentle nudge to tier-1 non-repliers, then stop.
• Forever: keep the event tags and the notes.

Common questions